A Multi-agent Based Decision -Making Approach for Field Service Delivery of IPS²

There is a trend increasing number of manufacturing companies offer field service to customers rather than only provide products for higher revenue and stronger competitiveness. However, these companies are experiencing a lack of proper and efficient decision support in maintenance policy selection and service resource planning of service delivery. In this paper, a multi-agent based approach to service decision-making of IPS² is presented and the performance evaluation result is given. Multi-agent based approach is utilized to model the service delivery network and different agents are generated to present the elements of field service network. Each agent has a distinct state transition and processing mechanism which can be highly coincidence with the actual situation owing to the flexibility and operability of multi-agent based simulation model. Furthermore, negotiation mechanism among the agents is introduced into the multi-agent based simulation model to map the dynamic characteristics in the actual service delivery context. A case study scenario of agricultural machinery maintenance is presented which clearly demonstrated that the proposed approach is efficient and can provide reasonable suggestions to the IPS² providers.